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A Jazz Dance Escape: Cherub At Terminal 5

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 09, 2016|

Posted by: Emily Oldenquist

People scurry around the leveled tiers of terminal 5. From this view, looking up makes me feel like an upside-down giant. This venue has three floor-levels with varying definitions of fun, but we are all here for the Doses and Mimosas, with a different connotation than originally meets the ear.

I gradually begin to think about the crowd here. My job is to judge the performance. But I am puzzled by the judgements that creep in about who is putting up a front within the audience. Who is here for the drinks and the atmosphere and the one song they can sing along with, and on the opposing, who is here for the entire performance?

I look around and notice the various X-ridden hands circulating the venue. The crowd is young and the the room is already packed as if the fans are here for the early-bird 9:15 pm special. Mike Floss and Gibbz open the show across nearly a two hour performance. Mike Floss hit the crowd with some good, "get-your muscles warmed-up" energy and Gibbz held down the fort with his nonchalant-dance-y vibes. Despite the angsty Cherub anticipators, Floss and Gibbz knew how to tolerate the crowd, as well as keep us tolerating the times we all personally fail to sing along.

As digits on iPhones and Casio watches flip, nearing 11:00 (the promised set time for Cherub), the crowd's volume fluctuates. LOUD; like they'll never come on and soft; like, "it is 11:02 and where could they be?"

Cherub has been off the new-release charts since the year 2014. But this 2-year period of no new material does not have Terminal Five worried at all. I got a sense of trust from a lot of these fans. Everyone wanted to dance, which differed from a some of the other shows that venues like this provide. 11:06 strikes, and beating light, synth heavy sounds plus "oooh ooh ooh" get the crowd in a roar. "Disco Shit" off of the 2014 album Year of the Caprese acted as the perfect first song on the set and the vocal score for the apologetic six minute delay went a little bit like this:

"I know. I know you think I'm crazy/But don't waste your time/Don't Worry bout me baby cause/I'm just sleep deprived/I gets so hard doing all these lines/But try to keep up so we can both lose our minds/This is that Disco Shit that keeps you up all night/Makes you want to move and/keeps you on our mind/This is that Disco shit that makes you feel alive/And makes you forget all about the time.

After this first song, the crowd forgot about the time. We were losing our minds and we definitely wanted to keep moving. With these lyrics in mind, props to the kick-ass drummer that Cherub identified pretty early on as rocking out with no sleep. Apparently the percussion pro had been running without sleep for three days.

The rest of the setlist seemed strategically planned to keep the crowd in between dancing until we lacked breath and keep us swaying our bodies to the music as we waited for the improvisational drops and new instruments Cherub brought to the performance. Some songs were cut short, and I was sad to only sing to "Do I (Where We Are)" for less time than the studio version. But with less "Do I make it hard for you some time/" chants, came longer riffs and the playful vibes cherub had to offer.

Yes, the show was filled with auto-tune. But Cherub rocked it. Jason Huber showed the crowd up with his pure and entertaining electric guitar solos. Jordan Kelley kept us engaged with his pacing in a diagonal performance fashion with microphone in hand. The vocals were not as fully-falsetto as the recordings often sound. But the sound was great and the energy was wild yet consistent.

For me, the cherry on top of this sweet sound was the invasion of the horns that stole part of the stage. Mid-set, Cherub got jazzy with what appeared to be a french horn and was a perfect accessory to the party vibes the Nashville duo brought.

The most popular single was not heard until the encore, in which the due reemerged with a slowed, talkative and spunky tone of the introductory lyrics to "Doses and Mimosas." "To all the high class ass that's too hard to pass/Oh yeah, I hate you too" sums up the playful, carefree "I-do-what-I-want-and-you-will-like-it" vibe that Cherub brought to Terminal 5.